Decide what to be and go be it.

Archive for the day “April 9, 2012”

It’s hard for me to believe but I finished the whole cloth quilt for Leah’s Quilt Along! First I want to thank Leah for answering my question on Thursday about not lowering the feed dogs. The answer made perfect sense and the implementation worked great.

Now on to the whole cloth quilt. As I’ve said before, it’s just not my style. But this project packed a whole lot of learning into a small quilt! I learned how to mark a whole cloth quilt…something that obviously has greater implications…marking motifs and borders. I learned that if I’m going to use the back door window for a light box, I have to either: 1. grow 2. start lower on the window or 3. get the step stool. I had some pretty tired arms by the time it was marked! I learned to keep the feed dogs up and the stitch length set at zero. If I had only believed that would work earlier, I would have saved beating my head against the wall a few times. I got a beginner’s idea about making feathers. The drawn feathers were not as difficult as I imagined them to be. Freehand may be another story. But another story for another day! I learned the importance of planning a quilting strategy…know where you want to go before you get there and know the route you’re going to take. The most important thing I learned was to accept where you are with your skill level and understand that even if it’s not where you’d like to be, it’s where you are. That doesn’t mean you have to stay there. Accept where you are right now and know where you’re going.

And…last but certainly not least…I love the way Leah taught us to attach binding! I’ve tried to join the binding at the end in this way before but found it extremely confusing. I would finally get it to look OK after several attempts. And, by that time, I had no idea what I did to make it work! But this was a very simple and straightforward explanation and it actually worked the very first time! Of course there are four corners. I would have been a fool to think all four of them would turn smoothly. The first three were wonderful. The fourth was a little bugger. No matter what I did, it wasn’t right. I finally got it as close as I could and let it go. I have enough real stress in my life to add unnecessary drama to it! :-) Bottom line is this…I still don’t like to attach binding. But I dislike it a little bit less now.

Last week, I was going to chuck this quilt in the trash. Now, I’ve become quite fond of it. I even gave it a name. I decided to call it Summer Sherbet. Just looks like a bowl of sherbet. I’m thinking I’ll keep it.

Just for giggles, here’s a picture of the Bunny Butt cake I made for the grandkids for Easter dessert. They thought it was pretty funny. Of course say “butt” to two eight year olds and they lose it! I got this recipe from the Betty Crocker website. Believe me…it was easy to make! I don’t do hard when it comes to baking!

I hope everyone had a nice holiday. And now it’s back to quilting!!

Watch this space for the Civil War basket quilt. It’s assembled and basted and ready for quilting. The plan is tomorrow…